Intervenants et résumés des communications > Matei IAGHER

Matei IAGHER (University College London) : « Renan’s Vie de Jésus in the Romanian Lands (1863-1923) »

Matei Iagher obtained his PhD in the History of Medicine from UCL in 2016, with a thesis about the history of the psychology of religion. He is currently working on turning his thesis into a publishable manuscript, and continuing to investigate the intersection between psychology and religion in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus had a slow and, for the most part, virtually underground reception in the Romanian lands. While a couple of brief theological criticisms came out almost immediately after the book was published in 1863, there do not seem to have been any wider debates about the book’s merits (or lack thereof), either inside the Orthodox Church or outside of it in the decades immediately after its publication. Nevertheless, the presence of the book in the libraries of Romanian intellectuals, as well as allusions to Renan in various works show that Vie de Jésus did not go unnoticed. Parts of Renan’s book were published in periodicals starting in 1888, but a full translation only came out in 1896. This was successful enough for the book to be re-issued at least five more times, and its popular success also prompted one of the Moldovan Bishops to commission a translation of Vladimir Guettée’s lengthy critique of Renan into Romanian (1898). While more theological critiques came out after the turn of the century, their acrimony seems to have petered out in the aftermath of the First World War. By 1921, Benjamin Fundoianu published the first and only history of the reception of Renan in the Romanian lands. He argued that the only visible points of Renan’s reception in Romania had been of the spears of his theological detractors and called for a belated vindication of the French author. Most likely, this vindication only occurred in 1923, when the centenary of his birth was marked by a speech given by the historian Nicolae Iorga to the Romanian Academy, as well as by a number of laudatory articles in the press. My paper will reconstruct this sixty years’ reception of Vie de Jésus, and ask questions such as: who were the readers of Renan in late 19th and early 20th century Romanian provinces? What were the arguments that were advanced for or against the book? In what way did the book influence local cultural production? The article will draw mainly on published sources, such as personal diaries, newspapers and magazine articles, and books.